Queer accounting: A University of California commission whose members include a former Defense secretary has challenged the methodology used by the Government Accountability Office to calculate the cost of the Defense Department’s homosexual conduct policy, reports GovExec.com.
The UC-Santa Barbara commission accused GAO of underestimating the cost of replacing military service members discharged under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. The widely criticized policy allows homosexuals to serve in the military so long as they do not disclose their sexual orientation and bars the military from asking.
The February 2005 GAO report found that the overall cost to recruit and train replacements for the 9,488 service members separated from fiscal 1994, the year the policy was implemented, through fiscal 2003, was $190.5 million. But the California commission reported that the actual cost was $363.8 million.
Aaron Belkin, chairman of the commission and an associate professor of political science at the University of California, called the figures used by GAO “loopy.” More specifically, they were too low and inconsistent with previous figures used, he said.
‘In assessing the cost of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, we shouldn’t shortchange the taxpayers or the brave service members who are directly affected by this failed policy.’The 29-page report from the UC commission, which included former Defense Secretary William Perry, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, six professors and five military experts, said that GAO relied on “unrealistically low estimates” provided by the service branches.
Using publicly available figures on the cost of basic training and initial skills training, the commission estimated the cost to train replacements at $252.4 million, $157.3 million more than the $95.1 million figure reported by GAO.
Not surprisingly, the GAO is standing by its numbers despite the fact that the commission’s cost estimate is nearly twice the GAO’s. What is even less surprising coming from a Bush administration official, is the tack taken by Derek Stewart, director of GAO’s Defense Capabilities and Management division. He downplays the cost of DADT as being a drop in the bucket of the overal defense budget.
Stewart said that if the intent of the report is to attract attention to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because of its overall costs, then he’s not sure that $363 million over a 10-year period will suffice, considering the size of the Pentagon’s annual budget, which has ranged from $300 billion in the early 1990s to $439.3 billion in President Bush’s fiscal 2007 request.
“If you use the GAO’s $190 million figure, it amounts to $19 million per year over a 10-year period,” Stewart said. “If you use the commission’s figure, it is $36 million per year over a 10-year period. In the grand scheme of the DoD multibillion-dollar budgets, it’s peanuts in either case.”
Belkin, who is also the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at UC, said it was “curious” that Stewart would minimize the policy’s budgetary impact, stating that “it goes right to the heart of the sloppy methodology they used.”
Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., said in a statement to Government Executive that the UC commission “started where the GAO left off” in finding the policy’s costs “to be almost double GAO’s conservative estimate.”
“In assessing the cost of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, we shouldn’t shortchange the taxpayers or the brave service members who are directly affected by this failed policy,” Meehan said.
A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Meehan is sponsoring legislation (H.R. 1059), which would overturn the current homosexual conduct policy. The bill has 109 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel in March 2005.
